Awareness session in Vienna: sustainability, jobs and enterprises

On 25 August 2026, ACCELERAS, the X-VET partner from Vienna, organised an awareness-raising session on sustainability for emerging professionals and apprentices. The aim was to help young people at the start of their working lives understand the challenges behind the green, digital and economic transitions — and what they mean for their own jobs, for the enterprises they work in and for the opportunities ahead.

Why sustainability matters at work

Sustainability is often discussed as a topic for governments and large companies. For apprentices and young professionals it is much closer to everyday work: it changes which skills employers look for, how products and services are designed, how resources are used and which new jobs appear. European research points the same way — Cedefop’s recent study of online job advertisements shows which occupations the green transition needs, and why vocational education and training is key to filling them.

From talks to discussion

The session opened with short presentations, each followed by questions and discussion:

• Who we are: ACCELERAS introduced itself as a partner for learning and development, working in corporate education, research and innovation, professional training and multimedia production.
• Sustainability is holistic: real solutions have to work on the social dimension (skills, inclusion, wellbeing), the ecological dimension (climate, resources, waste) and the economic dimension (jobs, growth, governance) at the same time.
• X-VET: the participants learned about the project and its results — the Integrated Sustainability Workbook, the X-VET MOOC with gamified micro-learning, the sustainability hackathons and their guide, and a certification aligned with the European approach to micro-credentials.

The discussions linked these ideas to the participants’ own training and workplaces, and to the opportunities that the transitions open up for enterprises and for people who want to start something new.

Design thinking and a mini hackathon

In the second part, the participants worked in small groups. Following the design thinking method, each group took up a sustainability challenge, defined the problem, developed ideas and turned the most promising one into a concept on a flipchart — a mini hackathon in the format that X-VET is developing for VET institutions.

One group, for example, developed “CryptoEnergy”: a digital marketplace where households can buy and sell electricity directly, with peer-to-peer trading through a blockchain and smart two-way energy grids. The group started from the problem — third-party distribution costs, households that cannot share or trade their surplus energy, and limited storage for renewable energy — and weighed the advantages, such as transparency and security, a more resilient grid, real-time energy management, greater consumer participation and energy independence, against the risks: a high initial investment, high maintenance costs, cybersecurity risks and the energy consumption of the blockchain itself.

Weighing ecological, economic and social effects together in this way is exactly the kind of thinking the session set out to practise.

Very positive feedback

The participants gave very positive feedback on the format — a mix of short talks, open discussion and hands-on group work — and recommended using it more often.

What this means for X-VET

Sessions like this take the X-VET approach beyond the partner institutions and show how sustainability can be made tangible for young people at the start of their careers. The experience is useful input for the Sustainability Hackathon Guide and the local hackathons that X-VET is preparing for VET institutions in the partner countries.

Would your organisation like to run a similar session or learn more about X-VET? Get in touch through the contact page.